About
Quake III Arena is id Software's 1999 multiplayer-focused first-person shooter, the third Quake game, which dropped single-player storytelling for arena combat against bots, with music by Sonic Mayhem and Bill Leeb. Quake3e is a modernized Quake III Arena engine built on ioquake3, adding an optimized OpenGL renderer alongside a from-scratch Vulkan renderer with dynamic lighting, anisotropic filtering, bloom, and HDR rendering, plus raw mouse input, a reworked virtual machine, improved server-side DoS protection, and higher filesystem limits. It ships no game content of its own and remains actively developed.
How it differs from the original
Unlike the original 1999 engine, Quake3e adds a full Vulkan rendering path and various offscreen-rendering, performance, and security improvements, while staying compatible with existing Quake III Arena mods rather than replacing them.
Getting started
To play, you need an existing Quake III Arena installation — the project itself is engine-only — and you copy Quake3e's built binaries into that installation's directory in place of the stock ones.